was with Marchent, walking up the slope to Nideck Point.
Jim cleared his throat.
"I understand," Jim offered. "She screamed and you tried to reach her, but you couldn,t reach her in time. That,s going to make a difference, even though you know you did your very best to get to her. That,s bound to make any man feel a lot of things."
Reuben thought, Yes, that,s true. But he felt no necessity to say anything about it. He thought of how easy it had been to punch that man in North Beach right in the face. And easy enough to do that and nothing else, to let the guy stagger and decide to move on.
"Reuben?"
"Yeah, Jim, I,m listening," he said. "But I wish you wouldn,t worry. Look, we,ll talk when it,s time for us to talk."
Jim,s phone was ringing in his pocket. He jerked it out angrily, studied the small screen, rose to his feet, kissed Reuben on the top of his head, and left.
Thank God, Reuben thought.
He sat there looking into the fire. It was a gas-log fire but a good one. He thought of that roaring untidy oak blaze in Marchent,s living room fireplace. He smelled the burning oak again, and her perfume.
You are alone when something like this happens. Doesn,t matter how many people love you and want to help you. You are alone.
When Marchent died, she was alone.
He had a sudden overwhelming sense of it. Marchent had probably rested her face against the kitchen floor and bled out alone.
He got up and went down the hall. The door to his father,s darkened office was open. City lights glowed in the tall white frame windows. Phil was in his robe and pajamas and was sitting back in his big leather desk chair, listening to music under the obvious black headphones. He had his feet up. He was singing in a low voice with the music, that eerie, disembodied singing that comes from people who are hearing a music we can,t hear with them.
Reuben went up to bed.
Sometime around 2:00 a.m., he awoke with a start. I own the place now, he thought. So I,ll be connected all my life to what,s happened. All my life. Connected. He,d been dreaming of the attack again, but not in the usual repetitive and fragmentary way. He,d been dreaming of the animal,s paw on his back, and of the sound of the creature breathing. In his dream it had not been dog, wolf, or bear. It had been some force in the darkness that savaged the young killers, and then left him alive for reasons he could not understand. Murder, murder.
In the morning, the Nideck lawyers and the Golding lawyers came to a settlement on all the personal possessions. The original handwritten codicil signed by Marchent and witnessed by Felice had been filed, and within six weeks, Reuben would take possession of Nideck Point, a name, by the way, that Marchent had referenced in her papers - and all that Felix Nideck had left behind when he vanished.
"Now of course," Simon Oliver said, "it,s too much to be hoped for that no one will contest this codicil or the will in general. However, I,ve known these lawyers at Baker, Hammermill a very long time, especially Arthur Hammermill, and they say they,ve been all through this question of heirs and inheritance already, and that there are no heirs to the Nideck estate. When Felix Nideck,s affairs were settled, they tracked every conceivable family connection, and there are simply no living heirs. This man friend of Ms. Nideck in Buenos Aires, well, he signed all the appropriate papers a long time ago, guaranteeing he would make no claim on Ms. Nideck,s wealth. She left the man quite a lot, by the way. This was a generous woman. She,s left quite a bit to worthy causes, as we say. I,ll tell you the sad thing here. A lot of this woman,s money is going to go unclaimed. But as far as the Mendocino property - and the personal possessions on the premises - well, my boy, I think you,re home free."
He,d talked on and on about the family, how they,d sprung up "out of nowhere" in the nineteenth century, and how the Nideck lawyers had searched exhaustively for family connections during those years when Felix Nideck had been missing. They,d never found anyone in Europe or America. Now the Goldings, and the Spanglers (Grace,s people), well, they were old San Francisco families, going way back.